Symposium on What is China? 何為中國? (CCL)

2015-03-23

The notion of “China” (中國Zhongguo) remains a controversial issue severely debated at academic and
popular levels. “Zhongguo” could mean a geographical site, a political
nation-state, a civilization or a people. Its complicated conceptualization has
been discussed and elaborated in modern scholarship. The publication of Ge
Zhaoguang’s Hewei Zhongguo? jiangyu,
minzu, wenhua yu lishi (What is China? borders, nationality, culture and
history) has re-ignited the debate in Chinese communities and abroad recently.
The symposium attempts to ask: What does it mean to speak of “Zhongguo” in the
twenty-first century? In what way the notion of “Zhongguo” is intertwined with
the growing world impacts exerted by the nation-state in Mainland China? How
would the debate on “Zhongguo” relate to the self-understanding of the
communities like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other neighboring countries?

Broad changes in Asia today are rapidly
transforming the everyday processes by which mobility/ speed, the sense of
place, visual culture, literary and cinematic imaginations,
body/subjectivity/desire, consumption culture, rights-based concerns, and so on,
are constituted. In postgraduate education, comparative works that rigorously
chart common questions and problematics, as
well as posing important conjunctural questions for the future of East Asian
cultural studies, remain rare.

This conference aims at bringing together scholars and postgraduate students
from two locales – or two distinct formations of cultural studies, if you will
– in Hong Kong and South Korea in order to chart a space of dialogue for
comparative learning and critique.

The conference will address the following two broad themes:
--- Cultural Studies and/as Movements in East Asia
--- Innovating Textual Methods